What is the name of your solution?
International Therapeutic Companion Network
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
We orchestrate human care services with clinical history on WHO standards, treatment evolution charts, accountability and financial management.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
We solve the problem of orchestration the service of care providers, health/education institutions (ej: insurances companies, hospitals, special schools, rests houses and others) and families.
Some worthing solving problems we found on the markets we are developing our business:
- Difficulty in selecting, contracting and managing human care services.
- There is a paradigm in Mental Health which extinguishes long term hospitalizations, how can this treatment be properly followed on patients daily life?
- Lack of communication integration between the professionals who provide the service and the doctors, psychologists and other decision-makers in the patient treatment.
- Lack of evaluation on the quality of the service provided and the performance of the provider.
- Existence of a black market, in which workers and consumers interact without legal certainty and without paying taxes.
- Lack of statistical data to assist decision makers with respect to patients evolution and the whole society in general. Where someone shall invest their resources to attend a society or client demand for service? For example, in which city, or neighborhood, we have more cases of autism, how many service providers we have on this place, how good they are at this kind of treatment? On the countries we are working this is a huge blind spot on statistics.
- High hospitalization costs.
- Difficulty in social reintegration and low number of patients successfully resocialized.
- Outdated processes and without the use of technological innovations that might optimize their management.
- Inefficient information exchange, which generates significant delays to start or to make some change on the service provided, usually with serious consequences for patients.
- Delays in referrals on the caregivers most indicate to provide the service.
- Lack of clinical supervision of the services provided.
- Lack of an evaluation on the type of bond built between caregiver and patient. Is this a proper bond to fullfill the treatment targets?
- Lack of professional caregivers consistently trained. Is this caregiver trained or have an educational level on how to provide this care? How can we consistently improve their knowledge on the subject?
- High-income countries: 35% to 50% do not receive treatment.
- Low-income countries: 76% to 85% do not receive treatment.
- Latin America: Investments represent 2% of countries' health budgets and around 60% go to psychiatric hospitals
We could find some more, but the last one:
- Especially on the low income families, there is a familiar who is in charge of the patient´s care, very often it is a women, and this person has to abdicated their dreams and life plans to become the caregiver for this patient.
Among the two countries and the main market niches in which RIAT is currently participating, we are evaluating a current market of approximately 50 million patients on Argentina and Brazil, with 130 million on Latin America and 1,5 Billion persons on the whole world.
Sources:
Ministry of Health of Brazil - ANS: Guidelines for Assistance in Mental Health in Supplementary Health
WHO - World Mental Health Survey Initiative WHO / Harvard in collaboration with the Facultad de Medicina de la UBA and the Argentine Association of Psychiatrists (APSA)
Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) National Institute of Statistics and Census of the Argentine Republic (INDEC)
PAHO - Pan American Health
Organization WHO - World Health Organization
What is your solution?
We started our company using paper and app´s that are already on the market to compose our solution.
Now we are implementing our own app and administrative website:
• An integral solution in human care.
• Daily reports with customizable statistics, based on ICD-11.
• Patient evolution charts.
• Integrated GPS with time sheet control.
• Evaluation of professionals to join the our network.
• Constant supervision.
• Excellent evaluation for the combination of professional and patient.
• We adapt to each patient's time and environment needs.
• Competitive prices.
• Integration with Business Intelligence, PowerB.I., so we can create prognosis indicators.
• Application and administrative Website Development.
• Training Course on Therapeutic Companion, for those who wants to enter the network.
• Complete Health Information System – our Humanized Management System
• Big data.
• IOT integration so we can evaluate the humor of the patient in comparison of the reports received
• Algorithmic evaluation of defense and desire mechanism – using the “Algoritmo David Liberman” (ADL)
Some things are already been testing and some other are in our roadmap tom implement on the next´s months.
Our Humanized Management System is centered on the patient and on the carer provider, so we arrange the organization to meet the needs of the patients with the standards of the carer providers.
We are constant investing on disruptive technology, so we can achieve an optimization of our service process which permit us to have better prices for the patients and institutions who contract us. Also we pay a share of 70% for the service provider, which usually made them have better payments than when working with ours competitors.
We fully integrated the information of the patients, receiving reports from every day service of each patient and gathering that for the team who whole is in charge of the patient, like doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, health insurance and who else may need, unfortunately we have had to provide access include to the police because of the patients needs. Also we provide transparency financial information for the institutions and families who contract us.
We focus on selecting the better provider for each the patient, we search for the things in common what can make the match easily. That includes personal background, political opinions, hobbies and etc.
And we achieve that faster than our competitors.
We are a social impact business and ethical oriented, that includes constant support for our service providers keep studying and self professional development with a full transparency practice on our management system.
We also have a supervision infrastructure which permit their improvement on their clinical interventions with no extra charge.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our main purpose that is our patient and their families can rebuild their lives, returning to their daily responsibilities, reestablishing security to family bonds and the peace of mind resulting from knowing that it is possible to find a new way of life.
Our system allows workers in this area to formally integrate into the labor market, generating social inclusion and direct jobs, in addition to health promotion and reintegration into society for our patients. We take care of the carers providers and select the one´s who are committed, ethical, respectful and loving because we can teach them the technical aspect of the job, but they need to bring their values at first.
We help families to focus on fulfilling only its role as a family member, while ensuring that the entire service works is organized.
Guarantee for the institutions a premium quality service, therefore, with us the difficulty of care management is solved.
We support the treatment team to receive reports from each session, allowing them to always be informed about the patient's evolution through charts and clinical novel, helping them to become more agile on their evaluation. This allow interventions to always be the most appropriate to the patient's current state.
Our system is projected to work with the WHO standards what permit us to contribute with the advance of mental health science as a whole.
Finally, we believe that this welcoming environment, derived from transparent relationships, allows love and respect to be transmitted to our patients, making their recoveries more effective, in an integrated solution for the management of the processes of therapeutic companion and caregivers.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
My name is Marcel and I´m one of the founders of RIAT, my background was on the garment industry, on my family company at Manaus/Amazonas/Brasil, where I fulfilled the Development Program, then after that I left the business to study psychology on Buenos Aires, I wish to investigate how the trust bond constructs a positive economical environment. Once I was here I studied a Therapeutic Companion course to have economical sustainability while I pursued my graduation degree.
Ana Joulie is my business associated and the other founder of RIAT. She was a Phd student of Clinical Psychology on Buenos Aires and also had studied as Therapeutical Companion to maintain herself while living in Buenos Aires. Before that she had a successful psychology office on Manaus.
At first we didn´t have an intention to start a company or even a business plan, everything started because we wanted to solve the problems of our patients and their families. At first we attended our patients by ourselves, but other families who saw our way of working, or in some cases an old patient that had been under treatment previously needed our services again, this made both of us have totally full schedule on 2016. By 2017 we couldn´t have more patients but we also couldn´t manage not try to help those families, so we start, free of charge and only intending to help, to search for some professional that might be interest on the service for those families. Soon it didn´t work out well because the families have problems with the service providers. So I realize that was an market opportunity. Then we start to have a share of 30% of the service provided and the service provider had 70%, but on this fee we give him clinical supervision included, so we could guarantee the service quality. Other important step was when the health insurances searched us to solve their problems on providing services on caregivers and therapeutic companions. From this days it evolved to all other things described above.
We made RIAT grow amidst the Argentine economic crisis, without financial reserves, only with cash management and reinvesting, we created a technology to scale the service and the developer disappeared with all our savings and never delivered it to us, then we started using different platforms to manage our service, we expanded to Brazil in search of a market stable (02/2020), at the same time we begin to face the devaluation of the Real, followed by the health crisis arising from COVID-19, which initially seemed to close our business entirely.
We tackled this by creating a virtual and face-to-face service protocol, providing training for service providers and validating our protocols with family members, health plans, companies and other customers. As we thought everything was fine, came a decision to implement a health debt in Argentina and many health plans started to discount 20% less from each invoice. We decided NOT to pass this discount on to service providers, as we understand the situation of social vulnerability they were in. So we tightened our legal area to collect overdue bills, especially from health plans, started investing in Marketing, we growth our revenue, we perceive the current moment as an opportunity and we create a Spin-Off of the company (called RISM), to meet the current demand in Mental Health.
Until December,2021 we have already provided service for more than 125.000 hours with hundreds of patients, each of them with distinct pathologies and contexts.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Enabling new models for childcare or eldercare that improve affordability, convenience, or community trust.
Where our solution team is headquartered or located:
Buenos Aires, CABA, ArgentinaOur solution's stage of development:
GrowthHow many people does your solution currently serve?
38 patients and 65 caregivers
Why are you applying to Solve?
Having a company on this market, especially on different countries and planning to expand to other will involve a lot of support on different areas and probably the MIT might have some of the best support available on most of the subjects we need. Some we are facing now:
- How we can reengineering our management system to includes our coordination sector.
- Advises on technological development of the company
- Connect to possible advisors.
- Marketing, Public Relations, Branding.
- Legal adjustments to the specific rules of each market
- Expansion into new markets
- Capital to face instability in the Health sector
- Implementation of a corporate governance system.
- Start to measure our ESG impact
But the most important one:
We have a huge dream, but we can only achieve this impact if we can make more people share our dream!
Solve seems to be an interesting place for this.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Financial (e.g. improving accounting practices, pitching to investors)
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Marcel Araújo Rocha
What makes your solution innovative?
We see a trend on the build of tech solutions on our industry: usually they work as a market place.
We are a data oriented company, with a strong believe that we shall improve the quality of the service for patients and organizations who requires our services.
We want to make an impact on mental health science, using our system to generate and organize the data in scientifically way, so we improve in the quality of the treatment and science development by evidence driven.
This is where we believe to be at least a one step ahead.
The innovation serves our business for the creation of solutions that meets the needs of our patients in individual and scalable way.
We started the use of technology by solving the accountability of providing the service, like how many hours of service each therapeutic company have done with each patient, how much and when they are going to charge. In the same system we developed our statistical daily report based on the ICD-11 (WHO) and a graphical presentation of the patients evolution for the medical and psychologist in charge of the patient.
After that we realize the need to promote the professionalization of our service providers, we focused on science developments, at first creating a partnership with an Argentinian university to create a therapeutic companion course with them so we can guarantee they all know the basic same technical knowledge. For another side we promote the scientific usage of our data so we can publish scientifical articles, thesis and books. We already published our first book and we are currently writing the second one, this focused on case studies of some of our patients.
Another innovation we are developing are which parameters we should measure to discovery who is the best service provider for each patients, we are searching what psychological tests we should apply to measure this parameters and how to implement it on a AI basis so we can scale it up.
On our future planning we want to develop our own ¨carecoin¨ so we can gamify the experience on our ecosystem.
We are focusing on process automation so we can direct our human resources to think and create individual solutions for each of our patients while the technology do the bureaucratic organization.
Since we gather information trough our daily reports and presents them to their medical or psychologist in charge, with this we can always guarantee that we are achieving the treatment goals, or making eventual corrections needed. The team in charge of the patients can see their evolution trough an easy to ready graphical solution, turning more agile their experience with reports and giving an statistical basis to the decision makers. We guarantee that our service provided team have skills trained on the needs of each patient, we assure that they are always under supervision and we offer an chat with our information coordination team, so the patients can adjust some schedule or any other organization needed for the service.
We are targeting that the ethical usage of our data is going to improve the mental health science, testing the existing paradigms, creating an empirical environment to the mental health clinic which is gonna permit us to test how effective is that therapy in comparison to other therapies possible used on other patients with the same disease.
We want to be able to forecast prognosis based on the statistics of that patient in comparison to the history of other patients with the same treatment and disease.
When we get there we are focusing at give the whole share of the contracts for the service providers, improving their quality of life, generating a more professional and ethical behavior, and a social impact as a consequence.
RIAT believes that knowledge and information are the key resource for the humanization, so the technology is our natural path.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
75
How long have you been working on your solution?
More than 4 years
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
We have a natural approach with diversity, equity and inclusion, although this is not a simple task, we need to improve much more and we have to start implementing and measuring ESG standards.
I said we have a natural approach because our job is developed inside our patients daily life so we must find persons who can adapt to each reality as a whole. Situations like pathologies, environment, patients conditions, neighborhood, faith believes, political preferences and some others.
As a consequences we are used to search for distinct kind of personalities traits and persons so we might improve the chance of doing a good matchmaking and for us this means that not only the patients feels good in their relation with our service provider but also our caregiver feels comfortable on their service with our patients.
If something is not working well we are going to know through the caregiver daily report and through our communication channels with the patients and their families. Through the supervisions and daily support we are always adjusting and communicating for the improve of the relationship and generating confidence on the caregiver and patients/families.
Our team search for caregivers focus on key abilities such as honesty, empathy and communication fondness. The technical abilities and other personal characteristics came secondly, because the technical ability we can teach and give them the formation needed and we are always going to find patients that meet the personal characteristics of our caregivers.
We know the importance of keep developing our standards of diversity, equity and inclusivity, and learn how we can improve.
What is your business model?
We provide caregivers, therapeutic companion and counselor on addiction. We charge the service per hour and we pay for our caregivers at least 70% of the price. Once our business keep growing we are planning to improve the percentage of our caregivers income, especially when our data become valuable for others such as governments, companies or students who might buy our books. This will enable us to pay the 100% for our caregivers and the company could sustain itself from the science data.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
We have been financially sustained since our first day, because we started the business providing the services by ourselves and then we start to save money so we could reinvest on our business to transform it on a company and keep growing.
Solution Team
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Marcel Araújo Rocha RIAT
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AM
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Our Organization
RIAT